SEO For Business Development – Aspects of Search Engine Listings

There are many aspects of SEO for business development purposes that have to be considered before determining the best search engine optimization strategies to use on your website, and understanding how search engines list your website is one of these.

Before discussing that, however, it is important that you understand some basic concepts of search engine optimization, particularly of SEO for business development as opposed to sales. This starts with your choice of keywords which should be those that visitors seeking information on your business would use. An important aspect of business development involves attracting and then nurturing potential customers, so not only is your choice of keywords important but also the landing page.

A landing page is one that has been optimized for the keyword you have chosen, and each of your keywords should refer to an associated page that has been SEO optimized for that specific keyword. From herein we shall use Google as the example of a search engine (Google takes about 80% of search engine traffic).

When prospects use Google to seek information, they use a form of words in the search box that we generally refer to as a keyword. The keyword can be a single word or a phrase, and that provides the searcher with a list of results that Google calculates to be the most relevant to the search term or keyword used. When your prospective customer clicks on your listed link they will be led to your landing page for that keyword.

While it is likely that more than one keyword will lead to any one page on your website, that page should be optimized only for keywords that are very close to each other in their meaning. Thus, if your niche is dog training, then the keywords ‘dog training’ and ‘training dogs’ can each lead to your home page on Dog Training. However, the keywords ‘training guard dogs’ and ‘training poodles’ should lead the visitor to different pages specific to these keywords.

This is very important, particularly in the development of your business where you want to differentiate between different types of customers and their needs. Search engine optimization refers to optimizing each page on your website such that Google and the other search engines list your web pages as offering the best solution to what Google’s user is looking for.

However, there is another form of optimization that does not receive enough publicity: business development optimization. This is specifically SEO for business development whereby each of your web pages is optimized to provide live visitors with what they are seeking rather than to keep snippets of code known as spiders or crawlers happy. In fact, in many respects, human visitors are more important since it is they that help to develop your business and are ultimately converted to customers.

A squeeze page, for example, is one that collects the names and email addresses of visitors, whom you can develop and nurture by means of emails and informative courses to ultimately become customers. This is a critical aspect of online business development that is more involved with web page design than the SEO that specifically focuses on maximizing your search engine listing position.

Which brings us to the initial objective: how search engines such as Google list your website. Like the other search engines, Google does not list domains but individual web pages. Check any search engine results page and you will discover a mixture of Home Pages, ending with the top level domain ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ for example, and website files or individual web pages ending in the file reference ‘.html’ or ‘.php’. There are other file types but these are the most common.

What this is telling you is that search engines list individual pages and not entire websites. It is theoretically possible for every page on your website to be listed separately, but highly unlikely. The easiest page to get listed is generally your home page, because that is the page to which most external and internal links will be pointing.

Although SEO linking strategy is another topic, you will likely notice that more pages on your own website link to your home page than to any other internal page, and the same is true of links to your website from other websites: most are to your home or index page. Little wonder, then, that your home page will generally have the highest Google PageRank score and also the highest search engine listing.

SEO for business development involves providing good relevant links to specific business pages on your website, and focusing on pages within your site that offer valuable information to customers and also perhaps collects their contact details to enable you to nurture and develop them as customers.